Music As A Visual Art

By Julia Gilichinskaya and Alexander Solomonov

On April 19, 2010, Joseph Dangerfield, a composer, pianist and conductor, read a lecture in the Moscow American Center. He told about his way of creating and playing music – it is linked with visual images. He said that he did not decide to be a musician. “If you are an artist,” he said, “you do not have choice. It chooses you”.

Joseph Dangerfield was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for the 2009-10 academic year to lecture, compose, and conduct at the famed Moscow Conservatory.

He is looking for ways to combine music and visual arts. “It's important for a musician to see other types of art”, he considers. He mentions composer Igor Stravinsky and painter Wassily Kandinsky, in one line of artists. He is interested in abstractionism and impressionism. He created new connections between music and visual art.

His music contains not only emotions, but colors, not only images, but pictures. Paintings or memories of beautiful nature inspire him to create music and his new works are based on it. He uses water, mountains and other images to shape his composition. He analyzes the music on a computer program to fix the colors in his music. He works with sounds as with plastic images - he creates the form, the color, the picture.

Music is something that happens in time, he said. It has the moment when it starts and the moment when it finishes. Visual art is a different thing. When you look at the picture, you don’t have to look at it, for example, from left to right, so that is the first and the main issue he wants to solve. The other issue is how to combine the frequency of voices and sounds with the frequency of colors.

For example, once he took some paintings by Paul Sezanne, a famous French artist, and examined the colors – how much blue there was or how much green. Dangerfield’s main idea is that you can look at the paintings, at their elements, in different ways and music helps you. Dangerfield tries to realize his vision of the picture with the help of his compositions, to show what is interesting for him.

In the future, he would rather use photographs for his compositions. When there are people in the pictures, Dangerfield tries to express their characters through sound.

Sometimes it takes the composer lots of time and pages of notes to come up with an idea for a new composition, but the differences between the first variant and the last one can be minor.

Dangerfield pays special attention to the instruments he uses and to the positions they have when recording because some instruments like violins can create shadows for the others. But again, Dangerfield never writes music only for one instrument but for a mixture of them.

We asked the composer how the picture influences the choice of instruments for the composition. Dangerfield mentioned two main principals that he follows.

The first one is the painting itself – because the specific instrument can be represented in the picture. And, the second is the mood which is created by the piece of art.

Born in 1977, he began his composition studies at Marshall University. He completed his master’s degree at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and received a doctorate in 2005 from the University of Iowa.

Dangerfield’s creative voice has been garnering much attention over the past several years with performances of his work throughout the United States and abroad. His American presentations include the Society of Composers Inc., the MusicX Festival at the Cincinnati Conservatory, the San Francisco New Music Festival, and the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music. His instrumental and chamber compositions have also been performed at such international venues as The Moscow Conservatory, The Frankfurter KuenstlerKlub, the Conservatorio di Giuseppe Tartini (Trieste, Italy) and in Cairo, Egypt. His music is strongly influenced by Johann Sebastian Bach, Igor Stravinsky, Frédéric François Chopin, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Alfred Garyevich Schnittke, and he considers these composers his favorite.